The Communist Party has put away Marx and Lenin. It's relying instead on the Bible and Russian war heroes as inspiration for a new political vision.
Spouting a mix of the teachings of Jesus and deep reverence for Russia's past military greatness, party leader Gennady Zyuganov sounds at times like a hometown preacher and at others like a saber-rattling nationalist.This fusion of religion and nationalism, strange as it may seem coming from a lifelong Communist, appeals to many Russians who believe democracy and capitalism are unjust and who were bitterly humiliated by the Soviet collapse.
Under Zyuganov's leadership, the Communist Party has risen consistently in opinion polls and stands a chance of winning the largest share of votes in December's parliamentary election. It finished second in the last vote, in 1993.
A strong Communist showing in December would mirror a trend in eastern Europe, where the comrades have gained support almost everywhere following the initial democratic euphoria after the Iron Curtain fell.
"The next parliament will be more on the left - from red to rose," predicts Olga Khryshtanovskaya, a sociologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
No party is expected to win an outright majority in December, but leading the voting would represent a remarkable comeback for a party that was banned for more than a year after the failed 1991 coup by Communist hard-liners.
A growing number of Russians seem to have forgiven - or at least willing to overlook - the party's brutal past, the millions of Russians sent to Siberian labor camps by Stalin, the secret police terror, the economic backwardness, the lack of freedoms.
The son of village schoolteachers, Zyuganov, 51, grew up in central Russia, poor farm country that has suffered from President Boris Yeltsin's free-market reforms and is now the heartland of support for the Communists.
"We have a broad support. There is a red belt from Novgorod through Oryol and the central part of Russia, the north Caucasus, the southern Volga, Orenburg to the Far East," Zyuganov told The Associated Press.
He became a party member while in the army. He was not a prominent Soviet official, but joined with party conservatives in 1990 to oppose Mikhail Gorb-a-chev's reforms.
Zyuganov emerged as an influential political figure two years ago when he revived the Russian Communist Party.
The party's platform has shed much of the old Soviet propaganda. Gone are slogans like "dictatorship of the proletariat" and calls for revolution.
But the Soviet Union's old borders have great appeal for Zyuganov, who is driven by the idea of "voluntarily" reconstructing the empire on a "step-by-step basis" - the kind of talk that alarms most of Russia's neighbors.
A huge relief map of the Soviet Union covers one of the large walls in Zyuganov's spacious office in the Duma, the lower house of parliament. A newspaper with the headline "For our Soviet Homeland" lies on a table.
His office also is full of dreamy paintings of the Russian countryside, and a Russian flag stands in the corner. The revival of a powerful, militarily strong Russian state is one of his goals.
This year alone, Zyuganov has made pilgrimages to Borodino, the site of an epic Russian battle with Napoleon's army, and the Ku-li-ko-vo fields in southern Russia, where the Russians defeated the Tatars in the 14th century.
Nationalism is just part of Zyuganov's equation for electoral success.
In his pleadings for the disadvantaged, Zyuganov comes across as a true believer who says he'll return communism to its true ideals.
His promise to provide security for the old and the poor and his pledge to restore the nation's greatness taps into a growing nostalgia and a deep feeling among many Russians that their lives are not going to improve soon.
Zyuganov's party would restore state subsidies for enterprises from kindergartens to coal mines, slow down market reforms and block any plans for broadening private ownership of land.
His base of support is aging rapidly, and among voters, there is still some suspicion these Communists are not all that different from the old ones.